On the second-to-last Monday of 2010, Brian Byrd was playing video poker on his Dell Inspiron laptop when someone knocked on the door of his home in Casper, Wyoming. The visitor, who drove a truck from the local Aaron's rent-to-own store that furnished the PC five months earlier, said the 25-year-old Byrd was behind in his payments and demanded he pay up at once. He then brandished a picture that was about to cause a national privacy uproar.

The image showed Byrd on his home couch using the very laptop in question to play online poker. The employee was also privy to a screenshot of the website Byrd's PC was displaying the moment the photo was surreptitiously taken, along with keystrokes he was entering while visiting a website. When Byrd demanded an explanation, the employee, identified in a police report as 24-year-old Christopher Mendoza, said he wasn't supposed to answer. But he went on to disclose that the PC contained software that allowed Aaron's employees to track its physical location and remotely activate its webcam and capture screenshots and keystrokes. Mendoza, according to court records, left the premises after Byrd produced a copy of a receipt showing the laptop had been paid for in full on October 1.

Last weekend, I performed a clean install of Windows 10 on my laptop using a bootable USB drive. After completing Windows 10’s installation, I installed a bunch of free software, including a free antivirus software, before beginning to use the laptop for my work.

Almost two-thirds of social-media users lie to make their lives seem more interesting, claims a new study. And experts say some suffer from 'digital amnesia' - forgetting real versions of events.

A previous Pencourage survey showed the most common issues people lied about were what they were doing at the time, such as pretending they were out when they were home alone, their relationships, holidays and success of their careers. Reasons for this included ‘fear of appearing boring’ and jealousy of others’ more exciting posts.

(...) This has disturbing implications, Dr Sherry says. ‘Many studies have demonstrated that even the simple act of imagining a childhood event increases a person’s confidence that the event happened to them in the past. ‘Researchers have demonstrated how readily false memories can form through the simple use of language. Even the phrasing of a narrative can shape how we later remember it.’

Leaked documents pertaining to the case against an American computer hacker currently serving a 10-year prison sentence have exposed discrepancies concerning the government's prosecution and raise further questions about the role of a federal informant.

Stéphane Koch's insight:

This "old" article is quite interesting to be read in the context of the FBI's claims on the presumed responsibility of the North Korean about the recent cyber attack on Sony. The article clearly demonstrate that "masked ball game" played by governments and intelligence agencies, and respectively that "the truth" is not their first priority... "cyber-attacks" are the new tools of the "dark diplomatic operations"... Among other things...

Web applications are becoming a vital part of our everyday life. Technologies migrate to web, as it is one of the most simple, efficient and compatible platforms to deliver any type of content. Almost any application has a web interface, or a web API. Microsoft and Google are moving their flagship products to the cloud accessible and manageable via web interfaces. Even mobile applications interact with web interfaces to send and receive data. Almost any database in the world is connected to a web interface or web application.

More and more people become victims of ransomware, a malware that encrypts your data and demands money to decrypt them. A new trend on the market shows that cybercriminals will now target your website as well to get a ransom payment from you.

Stéphane Koch's insight:

If you are running a CMS (dynamic website) you might be exposed to this new type of attack based on the Ransomware one... The malware will encrypt the CMS/website database and makes the website unaccessible when the contamination will be done.

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